The importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain for the development of Arthurian literature is well documented. Geoffrey situates Arthur in the line of legendary British kings extending back to Brutus. He raises Arthur's status from king to emperor with widespread conquests on the continent. He introduces motifs that echo through medieval and later literary history, including the story of Arthur's marvelous birth, the account of the battle with the Giant of Saint Michael's Mount, and the fleshed-out story of Mordred's treachery. He also virtually creates the Merlin figure as we have come to know him. In the course of doing so, Geoffrey constructs: a series of prophecies of Merlin that have inspired works whose plots depend on Merlin's prophetic powers; almanac predictions (a practice parodied by Jonathan Swift in ‘A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, Written Above a Thousand Years Ago and Relating to This Present Year 1709’); and poems in which Merlin predicts some future event, usually the triumphs of a future monarch (as in George Darley's ‘Merlin's Last Prophecy’, in which he foretells the glories of Victoria and the British Empire). Geoffrey also establishes the narrative of Arthurian pre-history, the period preceding Arthur, which includes the Saxon invasions that his uncle Aurelius Ambrosius and his father Uther must resist even before Arthur himself rules.

In the annals of Iberian history, few figures loom as large as Alfonso X of Castile and Leon. Known as ‘el Sabio’ or ‘The Learned’, Alfonso's reign from 1252 to 1284 marked a period of remarkable cultural and intellectual efflorescence. Yet, amongst his numerous contributions to science, law, and literature, it is his ambitious but ultimately unrealised imperial dream that has fascinated scholars for centuries.

Imagine a king, not merely content with his dominion, but yearning to revive the glory of a bygone empire in order to legitimise his rule. Alfonso X's quest for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire, a pursuit filled with political manoeuvring, ecclesiastical intrigue, and cultural innovation, stands as a testament to his visionary, albeit quixotic, ambition. This book delves into the heart of Alfonso's imperial dream, exploring not only the historical and ideological contexts of his ambitions but also how his aspirations for the Holy Roman Empire were intricately woven into the fabric of his cultural projects.

Embark on a journey into the heart of Alfonsine imperial ideology, seeing how it manifested in the cultural efforts of the Learned King. The following pages will contextualise Alfonso and his work, placing him at the centre of this study, and will explain the development and methodology of this research, which has endeavoured to unravel Alfonso X's imperial dream.

The Learned King and his work. The Estoria de Espanna.

If sexual intercourse itself began—thus Philip Larkin—“in ninety sixty-three … between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP,” it arguably took another thirty years to reach the field of musicology, when Susan McClary published her Feminine Endings in 1991 and Philip Brett went a-Queering the Pitch three years later. Yet, McClary and Brett were hardly the first to observe the confluence of sex, desire, and music. It would have required a particularly obtuse mindset to ignore the correlation between musical and sexual climax that is implicit in Isolde's Liebestod and made fully explicit by Richard Strauss in the orchestral prelude to Der Rosenkavalier fifty years after. And as McClary, Brett, and their peers among the “New Musicologists” of the early ‘90s readily admitted, they owed many debts to others—most obviously to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical literature of the earlier 20th century, and more recently to Michel Foucault and his Histoire de la sexualité of 1976, which remains to this day a seminal work in the field. Issues of gender in music and musicology had also already been thematized by Eva Rieger in Germany in the early 1980s.

Nor was sex utterly in its infancy in the music faculty of Cambridge when I studied there from 1981 to 1984, though when a serious lecturer announced that the closing lines of a dull madrigal “symbolized orgasm,” eyebrows were raised and little else (“Really?” said our college's director of music afterwards about the piece, “it sounds rather more detumescent to me”).

When the readers at the Colegio Jesuita de Zaragoza (Jesuit College of Zaragoza) highlighted the most striking passages in their reading of Jaume Roig's misogynist Catalan work, the Espill (The Mirror, ca. 1460), the miracle of the profaned Host was sure to figure among them (vv. 3502–3816, pp. 171–175). Set in the city of Zaragoza itself, the story recounts the prodigious transformation of the sacred Host (the bread or wafer consecrated in the Eucharist) into a human baby and the baby's return to their original form. In the Espill, the episode's entire chain of events begins when a domestically abused Christian woman seeks the help of a Muslim sage to increase her abusive husband's love. The sage agrees to help, but on the condition that the woman pay him and bring him the sacred Host. The woman complies but, upon delivering the Host to the sage, they find that the Host had miraculously transformed into a baby. The woman tries to kill the child by immolation, thus confirming her evil nature for nonmodern audiences. After a series of subsequent events, the woman dies in the end, miraculously struck and killed by a bolt of lightning, although nothing is said about the fate of the Muslim sage.

This book draws on my long-term involvement with South African townships. Townships are from the perspective of the suburb, which I use as shorthand for the wealthiest fraction of the country's population, the “other” South Africa. Getting to know the lives of township residents has meant crossing boundaries. I am not alone in crossing from suburb to township, but, tellingly in a deeply divided country, we are few.

I started to visit townships after arriving in South Africa in January 1994. I wanted to know what life was like for people there. Curiosity is an important academic attribute, and without it I would not have collected much of the material in this book. But it does not explain why my engagement with townships now stretches to decades. This has been sustained not only by curiosity, but also by political belief and moral conviction, and because the township has become a home and people within it friends.

The book only partially answers what life is like in townships. The menyetla or opportunities described and analysed are only one facet of township life, but an important one. It illustrates the lex lokasi, or law of the township, that is the book's focus. It is, however, an uncomfortable topic to be delving into; mud raking in the lives of township residents, most of whom are poor. Reviewers of the manuscript have stressed the need for contextualisation. Paraphrasing, their concern is that describing how people hustle to make ends meet creates a picture of township residents as law breakers. In turn, this produces a racialised narrative that obscures the larger framework of South Africa's structural violence, historical and current.

March 1719

During 1718, Spanish ambitions to recover former Habsburg territories in the Mediterranean area led to the creation of a quadruple alliance of Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces, and in August to the defeat of a Spanish fleet by British forces at the battle of Cape Passaro. In retaliation, the Spanish government decided to support the Jacobites and mount an invasion of Britain. In March 1719, one force led by the 2nd duke of Ormond aimed to land in the south-west of England, and a second diversionary force led by George Keith sailed to Scotland.

The government and other authorities in London were aware of the danger by 10 March. Archbishop Wake evidently suggested to the earl of Sunderland, first lord of the treasury, that there should be some religious response: he may have suggested a fast day. On 16 March, Sunderland reported that the king considered that it would be ‘sufficient to have some Prayers appointed to be said on the litany days’ (Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), in the same style as the three prayers issued for the earlier Jacobite rebellion (1715–E). Sunderland enclosed a copy of this form of prayer with his own proposed amendments, and enquired about the correct manner of signifying the king's order for the issue and use of the prayers.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Erskine, a miller at Newbyres Mill in Newbattle, was accused of witchcraft and sodomy and investigated by the presbytery of Dalkeith. He was arrested at some point after 15 October 1629 in response to an order that had also named two other men and two women. On this occasion, the presbytery referred to a warrant for arrest which had previously been issued by the privy council. The later documents write of Erskine alone, so it is not clear what happened to the other four suspects.

Erskine was kept in prison in Newbattle for six weeks. He seems to have been tortured with sleep deprivation until he confessed to all the crimes. Then, on 17 December, the presbytery petitioned the privy council, asking for him to be transferred to Edinburgh tolbooth because people in the parish refused to continue guarding him, and the house in which he was imprisoned was insecure. He was then moved to the tolbooth of Edinburgh.

More than three months later, on 2 April 1630, Erskine's trial came up in the central court of justiciary in Edinburgh. The prosecutor was Joseph Miller, substitute to the king's advocate. Dittays from 31 March 1630, based on depositions before the ‘Lord Justice’ (Alexander Colville, justice depute, who was the judge in charge of the trial), and likewise from the presbytery, were read in the presence of the assize. Erskine denied the crimes. The assize unanimously found him guilty, with the exception of witchcraft committed against Robert Hogg. Whether this was the only witchcraft charge, or whether there were other witchcraft charges of which he was found guilty, was not specified. He was sentenced to be strangled and burned in Newbattle.

An early leader in the girls’ Young Christian Workers (YCW) in England, Lancastrian Mary Lyons recalled in old age how the Movement had shaped her life, including her choice of husband and how they celebrated their wedding in 1942. She married a fellow YCW, Austin Lyons, and at their wedding, she wrote, ‘We sang “Rouse Up” and had the YCW badge as decoration on the wedding cake’. “Rouse Up” was the rallying song of the Movement, shared by both boys and girls, but the girls also had their own songbook. ‘Be proud to be a worker girl, like Christ your worker King; for carry on the world could not, save you your labour bring’ ran the chorus of one of the songs, set to the tune ‘Boys of Wexford’. Another began ‘What's that badge, what's that badge, O my brave Jocist girl’, and ended with a call to action typical of the YCW spirit:

Whilst sentiments of this kind were not unusual in the defensive and somewhat triumphalist culture of the English Catholic community in the 1940s and 1950s, the specific depiction of the status, dignity and mission of girls, and particularly of worker girls, was distinctive and rare.

To begin indirectly: any Irish person of my generation (I was born in 1958) who has read even a fraction of the commission reports and commentaries that have issued from Ireland in the past fifteen years on the record of pervasive child sexual abuse (much of it perpetrated by priests and religious and lay teachers), on the complicity between the Irish State and the Roman Catholic Church in the confinement and forced labour of young women and girls, on the systematic humiliation and punishment of unmarried mothers within institutions in which their children either died as infants or were forcibly taken from them as a matter of course, or on the incarceration of children within the vast and terrifying apparatus of industrial schools, will realise that the Irish story has been hollowed out. We are not as we once seemed to be.

1.1Como la comunidad de Pisa, toda Italia y casi todo el mundo os consideran extraordinario, invencible y victorioso señor Alfonso, rey por la gracia de Dios de Castilla, Toledo, León, Galicia, Sevilla, Murcia y Jaén, como el más distinguido de todos los reyes que viven o que vale la pena recordar […] y además saben que Vos amáis sobre todo la paz, la verdad, la piedad y la justicia, que vos sois el más cristiano y más fiel […] sabiendo que descendéis de la sangre de los duques de Suabia, una casa a la que pertenece el Imperio con derecho y dignidad por decisión de los príncipes y por entrega de los papas de la Iglesia […] Bandino di Lanzia's speech

Once the prize had been condemned, the agents were responsible for applying for the Bounty or Head Money due to their clients. They had to provide copies of the necessary documents:

• • The proof of condemnation

• • The proof of the number of men involved in the prize

• • The Power of Attorney from both crews

• • The certified muster lists from both crews

• • A reminder of the Act by which Bounty was to be paid

• • A statement by Samuel Seddon, the Admiralty's Solicitor, that the documentation was complete

• • The Treasury confirming that no flag officer had claimed a share within the fifteen days’ grace allowed

• • The deposition by the master of L’Heureuse that there had been seventysix men on board at the time of the capture

[On the cover of the little parcel of papers] Received the 22nd April 1757 No 395 extra William Redstone, James Bensley, Charles Brett and Philip Stephens Bounty to the Tartar and Happy sloop for taking the Heureux a French privateer £380 0s 0d

The state of the case of William Redstone, James Bensley, Charles Brett and Philip Stephens Esq claiming payment of Bounty Money at £5 per head for 76 men taken in the L’Heureuse a French privateer by his Majesty's ship the Tartar Captain John Lockhart Commander and the Happy sloop Captain Thomas Burnett Commander on 16th September 1756.

To have any hope of being released from French imprisonment, the American merchant seaman held as a prisoner of war had to be able to prove two things: that he was truly American and not British, and that he had not been working for the British at the time of capture. This is only partially analogous to the plight of the impressed American in the Royal Navy, who had to prove only his nationality, although most of the prisoners in France did not understand that.

There is a substantial amount in the historiography of impressment, of the impressment of Americans by a British institution, and of how that led to the creation of a document designed to prevent it, which in turn influenced the development of a modern understanding of citizenship. The 1924 publication, Impressment of American Seamen by James Fulton Zimmerman, remains the foremost study of the British practice as it was used against Americans. Denver Brunsman, in his article “Subjects vs. Citizens” defines its application as a sort of “forced migration”, while Jean Choate termed it “involuntary servitude”; but J. Ross Dancy, in opposition to such views, wrote “though impressment was not the tyrannical and evil implement that history has depicted, on some level it did physically deny men their freedom”, seeming not to perceive that that denial of freedom was the point of contention or that it required tyrannical and evil behaviour on the part of Royal Navy officers to enforce. Dancy's apology brought disputing responses from other historians, particularly Isaac Land. Because so few of the American seamen who ended up as prisoners of war in France had also been impressed by the Royal Navy, impressment is not the real concern of this chapter.

This appendix records the evidence for forms of prayer used by the main nonconforming denominations in Britain on the occasions of special worship appointed by the state or the established churches. In Scotland, the use of set forms was opposed by the established church until the early twentieth century, but congregations of the Episcopal Church adopted the use of the BCP and special forms of prayer from the early eighteenth century. In England and Wales, the position was reversed. In contrast to the Church of England's prolific production of special forms, the dissenter chapels and later the nonconformist and the free church denominations did not publish forms of prayer until the early twentieth century. It should, however, be noted that some dissenters undertook occasional conformity with the Church of England in order to qualify for public office, and so would sometimes be present at church services which used the BCP and perhaps special forms of prayer.

The Episcopal Church in Scotland

As explained in volume 2, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii, cxxiii–cxxiv, an act of toleration in 1712 (10 Anne c. 7) legalized use of the BCP in Scotland, and protected the worship of those members of the Episcopal Church in Scotland who took oaths of loyalty to the crown. From 1714, the always small number of these ‘qualified’ chapels received further official recognition, in being specified together with the Church of Scotland in the orders in council that were issued for alteration of names in prayers for the royal family.

From a sixteenth-century Republic of Letters confined mostly to Europe and centered on practices associated with the recovery, study, and wider use of Greco-Roman antiquity, eighteenth-century learned culture acquired a more global geography, expanding its remit to include critical scholarship about a greater variety of subjects: civic virtue, sentiment, commerce and political economy, natural philosophy, natural rights, and the normative sphere of equality. In ways that are of increasing interest to eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural historians, as well as to historians of early modern cultures’ scholarly practice, aspects of late humanism remained vital as the midwife of the eighteenth-century scholarly culture that begat the Enlightenment. But exactly how the culture of late humanism evolved into one that produced the spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries remains a fruitful and understudied avenue of inquiry. As I argue in what follows, the articulation of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century learned cultures emerges into sharpened focus when the origins of the ‘secular Enlightenment’ – and indeed, the full spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries that flourished by the middle eighteenth century – are historicized as contingent outcomes of a longer-term process by which participants in the expanding early modern republic of letters injected humanist methods and textual erudition into confessionally- driven religious debates, and extended their application to the study of non- European textual traditions.

Theodor Fontane's Graf Petöfy, presented here for the first time in English translation as Count Petöfy, was originally published serially, in weekly installments, in the summer of 1884, with the first book edition appearing just a few months later. The novel's namesake character is Austro-Hungarian count and theater enthusiast Adam Petofy. Set in the year 1874, the story begins in Vienna, where Petofy, seventy years old and a lifelong bachelor, has decided to propose marriage to the young Prussian actress Franziska Franz. Friends and family on both sides express misgivings and urge caution; they predict that the marriage could be unhappy or even end badly. The two marry anyway and leave Vienna for Arpa Castle in Hungary, where it doesn't take long for things to go badly.

Even from this brief summary, one could make an educated guess and attribute the novel to Fontane. It begins with an ill-advised marriage and ends with the consequences that come of it. The characters make plans and try to carry them out, but things don't work out the way they had planned. It is a book in which not much happens, and what little does happen comes as no surprise. There is an almost tragic element to how things come to pass in the novel, as the characters, despite their best efforts, eventually live out and realize the pessimistic predictions expressed at the outset.

Previous chapters have framed the scope of the Alfonsine interest in the imperial dream and demonstrated that the ideological project pursued by Alfonso X permeated all aspects of his reign. Whilst in a, theoretically, ideal position, the Learned King faced the opposition of the papacy and his own kingdom. His response was to develop an ideological apparatus that could, on paper, explain the reasons why his aspirations were not just fair, but also unquestionable by any earthly powers.

This cultural production ranged from poetry and music to science and games and from political treaties to lengthy chronicles that would go back to the moment of creation. All these works had a place within the ideological universe of Alfonso X and served a purpose: for instance, the legislative works mentioned in the previous chapter exhibited, profusely, the new Alfonsine organization of the kingdom/empire, and the Setenario developed, amongst other topics, the relationship between the monarch with his own past, and with God and religion.

Hence, Alfonso X's cultural programme materialized as the embodiment of the ideological underpinnings of the Castilian-Leonese monarchy during the latter half of the century. These literary creations served to rationalise and bolster Alfonso X's endeavours in pursuit of the imperial crown. While this political aspect is more discernible in select works promoted by Alfonso X – like the Siete Partidas and the Setenario – all of the compositions overseen by the erudite monarch played a role in shaping the ideological architecture of his reign. Together with these legislative works, those within the historiographical genre proved to be key for the Castilian-Leonese monarch's ambitions.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the violin—hitherto a simple but successful and popular musical instrument—underwent a significant metamorphosis. By 1900 it had become a fetishized art object, an icon of classical music, and a prominent symbol of Western civilization. Developments in the composition and practice of classical music can account for much of this transformation, but the shadow cast by the Industrial Revolution with its overwhelming influence on commerce, consumption, class relations, workplaces, leisure, education, transportation, and communications calls into question a strictly musical explanation. The full account of this fascinating transfiguration includes a number of important factors and a diverse mix of characters. The “sacralization” of the listening experience certainly contributed to the consecration of the violin, but the ways in which these instruments were made, maintained, bought, sold, referred to, collected, exhibited, and—most importantly—identified, were collectively of greater consequence. With the demise of the patronage system, the status of cultural objects—especially art and antiques—suddenly became ambiguous. They were thrust into a state of flux. In the art market that emerged to fill this void in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the destinies of such objects were now determined by broader sociocultural developments external to the objects themselves. Violins, like other cultural artifacts in this new economic environment, became commodities whose value was calculated, not in terms of labor and materials but according to abstract concepts like “authenticity,” “purity,” and “genius.”